transparency.....

As anyone who has been around this blog for a while will know, I am dotty about light reflecting through translucent things,
glass bottles, stained glass, leaves, just about anything colourful and transparent can look wonderful when magically glowing with light passing through it..
Window at the Port Elizabeth Main Library built in the late 1800s

Manmade stained glass has made a transition from traditional styles to wonderful contemporary ones.

But Nature has her own form of this translucency. As the Northern Hemisphere is cloaked in spectacular Autumn colours right now, we have our own leafy phenomenon going on here in the Southern Hemisphere.

Many of our indigenous trees have "autumn colours" in their new foliage as it emerges in spring. The upside of this is that, instead of being old hard solid looking leaves, they are young and tender and very translucent, so that as the strong African sun shines through them, they look like nature's stained glass.

Leopard tree in our garden